Jonathan Lethem writes weird stuff. Dense, descriptive, laced with mystery and quirk, his novels crisscross a wild expanse of genres. Sometimes these genres are obvious: His 1994 debut, "Gun, with Occasional Music," is a wickedly readable gumshoe novel peopled with hyper-evolved animals. (One of the thugs is a kangaroo.)

And sometimes they're subtle: In 2009's "Chronic City," the characters sit around toking and talking in a peculiar, misty, alternate New York City with a runaway tiger and no trace of 9/11. In between his books have imagined, among other things, a post-cataclysmic Wyoming, a tetchy wormhole in a California lab, a New York detective with Tourette's and Brooklyn teens with a ring that grants the power of flight.

His upcoming "Dissident Gardens," to be published by Doubleday Sept. 10, promises a return to the Big Apple (this time, Greenwich Village and Queens) in a multigenerational portrait of American Communists chasing their own magic ring. Lethem fans like this one expect a few surprises, because there always are. As he wrote of detective novels in one of his own ("Motherless Brooklyn"): "Things are always always."

This year's event takes place from Thursday, Sept. 19, to Sunday, Sept. 22, at the Empire State Plaza in Albany. Registration costs $175 for all four days; more information can be found at http://bcon2013.com.

The Canadian-born comic Russell Peters, who holds records for selling the most tickets to stand-up shows in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, was also the first comedian to sell out the 18,000-seat Barclays Center in Brooklyn when it opened last fall.

Born of Anglo-Indian descent, Peters, 42, uses a gift for accents and his status as a neutral outsider — a biracial, brown-skinned Canadian — to offer a genial, nonthreatening but very smart take on racial differences around the world.

He's as comfortable sounding South African as he is Taiwanese, and his brand of post-racial observational humor brings to mind a more globally minded old brother of the American comic Aziz Ansari. They get away with saying things that might be controversial coming from a black or a white comic.

See Peters in the comparatively intimate setting of Albany's Palace Theatre, which seats 2,800, for all-new material from his "Notorious" world tour.